


i'm awake and feel the ache

by nbsherlock



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky Barnes-centric, Canon Compliant, Gen, Identity Issues, M/M, Past Abuse, can be read as gen but is intended as a romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-05
Updated: 2016-11-05
Packaged: 2018-08-29 03:48:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8474212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nbsherlock/pseuds/nbsherlock
Summary: there are small spaces between with steve and without him. they are spaces filled with white noise and grasping for memories, whether his memories are being wrenched from him or not. he is a soldier, he is The Soldier, he is alone.





	

There are small spaces between with Steve and without him. They are spaces filled with white noise and grasping for memories, whether his memories are being wrenched from him or not. He is a soldier, he is The Soldier, he is alone.

\--

The other men are sitting around a fire and talking about dames back home. They talk about kissing and touching and Bucky thinks, this is the kind of precursor thought to harsh breath in sleeping bags. Bucky thinks, what kind of g’damn world are we living in that it’s okay to just talk about this stuff? Bucky thinks, Steve would be praying right about now. Bucky rubs his hands together and tries to focus on keeping the blood circulating through his body.

The other men say, “Barnes, you got a girl back home?” He’s got plenty of girls. He thinks about the girl with the big brown eyes he took to the Expo before he got sent off to basic. He thinks about the way her hands clasped together and she gasped when the car started floating and he thinks about looking back to Steve and finding him gone. And isn’t that just the way it was, he wants to say. I could never have both. I could have my best guy or I could have some girl for the night.

He doesn’t say that. He wonders if any of those dames ever fantasized about him down on one knee. He says, “yeah I got a girl.” He doesn’t know why he says that.

\--

Then it’s not comradery anymore. It’s not huddling around fires with guns unloaded talking about marriage and the taste of Murray’s girl’s cunt. All of a sudden Murray’s brains are spilling out in front of Bucky and he heard horror stories about men trying to shovel guts back into unresponsive bodies, but Murray’s brain matter is all over the floor and even in the thick haze of desperation, Bucky knows pushing that back in won’t make him wake up again.

“C’mon Barnes,” someone is shouting. Bullets are still burying themselves in bodies and men in the same uniform as Bucky are screaming and dying and Bucky thinks, if I move right now, I’ll either live or die. He thinks, this isn’t what I signed up for, but what did he think he was signing up for anyway?

And then, in one moment of clarity, he thinks of Steve. He hopes he’s drawing the same Brooklyn skyline for the millionth time. He hopes life is as monotonous as it was before. His skin crawls with it.

\--

He doesn’t write it down, but. Well.

Steve,

Lots of men are dying. And I’m only fighting with so many. So, there’s other men in other places dying too. I keep thinking about how badly you wanted to be here. How badly you wanted to do your part. All we do is die. We’re not doing shit to stop this war. All you’d be doing is dying. All you’d be doing is spilling your guts all over the ground for no one to clean up and no one would ever find out because you got no family back home. I’m all the family you got and I’d be bleeding out too.

He crumples up the thought.

\--

And then they get captured because they’re only human and there’s bright blue lights zapping people off the face of the earth and there’s no humanity in that. They get shoved in cells and taken one by one and Bucky has to say take me instead, take me instead of him. And they take him. They take him and that’s it.

\--

His arm is off. His fucking arm is off. He keeps trying to move it and it won’t. The cold is unbearable. The arm is off and they keep trying to put a new one on but bodies don’t work like that, he argues. They shove something in his mouth and inject something into his flesh and when he wakes up the metal is part of him.

He can move it. It’s a part of him. He imagines himself in a fancy box at Stark Expo and all the girls swoon because he’s so handsome, he’s so handsome and he’s half robot. How neat is that? The girl with the big brown eyes points him out and giggles. Steve is gone. He’s from Jersey. He’s from Jersey and he’s bigger now, he thinks.

\--

And then things keep blurring and he stops feeling half human half robot. He’s not the thing the girls point and blush at. He’s a monster. He’s got a trigger finger in his head. They keep putting guns in his hands. They keep freezing him up. They keep thawing him out.

They beat him up and then tell him where to shoot.

He draws the same damn Brooklyn skyline.

It is monotonous.

\--

A new day, a new time. A ballerina spins in circles in front of him. She keeps spinning. There is an itch in the back of his mind that wants to ask if she’s okay, if she wants to stop. The frostbite burn in his hands and feet pushes her across the room and watches as her body shatters the mirror. She bleeds but they stitch her up.

The next time, he throws a punch and she ducks. When she straightens back up, she smiles at him.

\--

“You are weak,” he spits at her. She keeps smiling because they have bred her to be invincible to sticks and stones and words. He digs a hand into her hair, fiery red against silver. He yanks her across the room. He bashes her head into the glass until they tell him to stop.

\--

Then, they fall asleep in the same room. She rolls over and looks at him. His eyes blur.

“Are you crying?”

The Soldier does not cry.

“Are you sorry?” she pushes.

Someone inside of him is sorry, but he says nothing.

“You are weak,” she says, and falls asleep.

\--

He wakes with a new mission and a new handler.

He sees a man on a bridge.

He knows him. He does.

\--

And then, he is on the run. The man on the bridge’s name was Steve and he keeps a journal about him. He writes in different languages and thinks about the big picture of his own face in the Smithsonian.

The internet says it is probable that there are 7 people in the world who look exactly like you.

James Buchanan Barnes fell from a train and was never recovered.

He looks down at his hands. He looks at the journal about Steven Grant Rogers. He wants to be James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes, for Captain America. For Steve Rogers. He holds his head in his hands.

The Soldier does not cry.

Except he does begin to cry and it shakes his entire body.

Per that logic, he is no longer The Soldier.

\--

He sleeps in a mattress on the floor with the Steve Rogers journal under his pillow and thinks about going home. The Smithsonian said that was Brooklyn, New York. Brooklyn, New York was home to Steve Rogers as well, but now he is living in Washington D.C. He wonders if Steve Rogers stays away from Brooklyn, New York because he is still grieving the loss of Bucky Barnes. Of him.

He reframes.

\--

He is Bucky Barnes. Or at least, he is trying very hard to be. And Steve Rogers is looking at the notebook he has filled with facts on him. Something in his gut tells him he should be embarrassed.

Steve Rogers has a small smile on his face. He says, “You know me.”

It is all very complicated from there.

\--

They freeze him over again because unlike the Black Widow, words can still cut into him and make him cut back. But he chooses it this time.

He is Bucky Barnes, and he has chosen his own fate this time.

\--

And then, when he thaws, there is not any time where he is without Steve Rogers. There is no space between with him and without.

The white noise disappears. The picture on the screen is pure and vivid.

 

\--

**Author's Note:**

> this was kind of a vent fic? i wrote it in about an hour. kudos and comments are always appreciated. hmu at @jbbrnes on tumblr. thanks.


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